Step into the top-secret U.S. government laboratory where American scientists
created the atomic bomb in 1945.

Sculptor Jim Sanborn spent five years collecting chunks of uranium, radiation
detectors, spherical devices, and government photographs to help him depict the
Critical Assembly Lab and the Chemicals and Metals Lab at Los Alamos, N.M., as
they looked in the final months of the Manhattan Project.

His exhibit opens today at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, and it's
called, "Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction."

Seduction?

"Very often scientists can be seduced by the power they are working with,"
Sanborn said. The exhibit "is about the seductive effect these materials have on
scientists. Nuclear power is very seductive."

Sanborn depicts the experiments by which U.S. scientists learned to press the
trigger that launched the nuclear arms race that continues today.

Too Much Detail?

Jim Sanborn, creator of the exhibit "Atomic
Time: Pure Science and Seduction," stands in front of a radium dial clock
frozen at 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, in Ancho, N.M., the time of the
nearby blast of the first atomic bomb. [ABCNEWS.com]

Because it is so technically detailed, the exhibit may
ignite a debate about whether it reveals too much about how to make the bomb
(after all, Iran and North Korea are working on similar devices, far less
primitive and far more potent).

"The information contained here is readily available from public sources,
including hundreds of declassified documents posted on the Internet," Sanborn
said, but "I don't think it's been represented three dimensionally so precisely
before."

"This is a shrine to the best and the brightest," said Mills Davis, a
computer consultant who viewed a preview and said the exhibit extols the genius
of the bomb's scientists. "It's only smaller minds who would say: 'By God, if we
start talking about this, people will start making bombs!'"

Sanborn said he had no idea whether the federal government might attempt to
limit access to the exhibit materials.

If President Bush chose to view the exhibit, "I think he would probably be
quite chilled by just how much information is available to everyone about this
subject," Sanborn said. "You're all of a sudden surrounded by the lab. I'm not
sure it's a position he's ever been in."

¡®Festive Menace¡¯

If government investigators do show up, they will be confronted by these
sights and sounds:

Amplified clicking sounds from detection devices announcing the presence of
low-level radiation from four radium wristwatches. (Nothing else in the exhibit
is radioactive).

Racks of black, cabinet-sized detection equipment, their U.S. government
property tags attesting to their original service at Los Alamos. "I like to
think it has festive menace with the green and yellow lights," Sanborn said.

Artist Jim Sanborn's conception of the
bottom half of a disassembled spherical device created by U.S. scientists
in 1945 experiments in connection with America's first atomic
bomb.

Blue radium clock dials frozen at 5:30
a.m., July 16, 1945, the time of the Trinity blast in Alamagordo, N.M. (Sanborn
bought the clocks at flea markets and antique shops in Alamagordo. "These are
the original Doomsday Clocks," Sanborn said. "I found them by carrying a Geiger
counter" into showrooms and storage areas.")

A series of uranium radiation photographs. Sanborn created them by placing
chunks of the element on photographic paper and allowing the radiation to create
an image. In effect, Sanborn said, "the uranium took its own picture."

Silvery metal spheres, the central components of the Trinity experimental
package. Sanborn said he purchased blank spheres from former lab employees who
bought them as surplus in the 1950s and 1960s. (One was serving as a bird bath).

Miniaturization

Sanborn used the blanks to machine replicas of the original weapons-grade
spheres, which, in the 1940s, were packed with uranium and plutonium.

The original spheres, Sanborn said, were about 18 inches in diameter. By
1947, the size was already shrinking, he said, first to 13 inches, then to 8
inches.

"Now the entire nuclear device can be the size of a walnut," Sanborn said.

Citing weapons experts and declassified government publications, Sanborn said
the bomb ignites when a hemisphere of munitions explodes, compressing the core
of radioactive material, which triggers a nuclear blast. Today, he estimated,
the total weapons package has been reduced to about eight inches in diameter.

"That's how they're able to build a suitcase bomb," Sanborn said.

"Discussion" ¡ª that's the value of the exhibit, according to John
Coster-Mullen, an atomic research historian and photographer who attended a
preview.

"The Clinton administration was buying up fissionable material around the
world, which is really the only way to prevent terrorists from making the bomb.
The Bush administration came into office and stopped the purchases. Maybe this
[exhibit] will get people talking about this issue again."

By its presence near Pennsylvania Avenue, "Atomic Time" literally brings the
issue of weapons of mass destruction to the door of the White House. A White
House guard post and driveway sit 210 steps from the front door of the Corcoran
Gallery.

Sanborn is no stranger to government science and secrecy. In 1991,
commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency, he sculpted Kryptos, a curved
copper plate which sits in a courtyard at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Va.
Devised in consultation with a retired government cryptologist, the plate
contains a coded message that has never been fully deciphered.